On the Choice of Books

"Dr. Rae, the Arctic explorer and first discoverer of the fate of Sir John Franklin, who is an M.D. of Edinburgh, was now made LL.D. He is of tall, wiry, energetic figure, slightly baldish, with greyish, curly hair, keen, handsome face, high crown and sloping forehead, and his bearing is that of a soldier—of a man who has both given and obeyed commands, and been drilled to stand steady and upright. Carlyle himself was offered the degree of LL.D., but he declined the honour, laughing it off, in fact, in a letter, with such excuses as that he had a brother a Dr. Carlyle (an M.D., also a man of genius, I insert parenthetically, and known in literature as a translator of 'Dante'), and that if two Dr. Carlyles should appear at Paradise, mistakes might arise.

"After all the LL.D's had heard their merits enumerated, and had had a black hood or wallet of some kind, with a blue ribbon conspicuous in it, flung over their heads, Principal Brewster announced that the Lord Rector would now deliver his address. Thereupon Mr. Carlyle rose at once, shook himself out of his gold-laced rectorial gown, left it on his chair, and stepped quietly to the table, and drawing his tall, bony frame into a position of straight perpendicularity not possible to one man in five hundred at seventy years of age, he began to speak quietly and distinctly, but nervously. There was a slight flush on his face, but he bore himself with composure and dignity, and in the course of half an hour he was obviously beginning to feel at his ease, so far at least as to have adequate command over the current of his thought.

"He spoke on quite freely and easily, hardly ever repeated a word, never looked at a note, and only once returned to finish up a topic from which he had deviated. He apologised for not having come with a written discourse. It was usual, and 'it would have been more comfortable for me just at present,' but he had tried it, and could not satisfy himself, and 'as the spoken word comes from the heart,' he had resolved to try that method. What he said in words will be learned otherwise than from me. I could not well describe it; but I do not think I ever heard any address that I should be so unwilling to blot from my memory. Not that there was much in it that cannot be found in his writings, or inferred from them; but the manner of the man was a key to the writings, and for naturalness and quiet power, I have never seen anything to compare with it. He did not deal in rhetoric. He talked—it was continuous, strong, quiet talk—like a patriarch about to leave the world to the young lads who had chosen him and were just entering the world. His voice is a soft, downy voice—not a tone in it is of the shrill, fierce kind that one would expect it to be in reading the Latter-day Pamphlets.

"There was not a trace of effort or of affectation, or even of extravagance. Shrewd common sense there was in abundance. There was the involved disrupted style also, but it looked so natural that reflection was needed to recognise in it that very style which purists find to be un-English and unintelligible. Over the angles of this disrupted style rolled out a few cascades of humour—quite as if by accident. He let them go, talking on in his soft, downy accents, without a smile; occasionally for an instant looking very serious, with his dark eyes beating like pulses, but generally looking merely composed and kindly, and so, to speak, father-like. He concluded by reciting his own translation of a poem of Goethe—

"'The future hides in it gladness and sorrow.'

And this he did in a style of melancholy grandeur not to be described, but still less to be forgotten. It was then alone that the personality of the philosopher and poet were revealed continuously in his manner of utterance. The features of his face are familiar to all from his portraits. But I do not think any portrait, unless, perhaps, Woolner's medallion, gives full expression to the resolution that is visible in his face. Besides, they all make him look sadder and older than he appears. Although he be threescore and ten, his hair is still abundant and tolerably black, and there is considerable colour in his cheek. Not a man of his age on that platform to-day looked so young, and he had done more work than any ten on it."

The correspondent of the Pall Mall Gazette gives some interesting particulars:—

"Mr. Carlyle had not spoken in public before yesterday, since those grand utterances on Heroes and Hero-worship in the institute in Edwards Street, Marylebone, which one can scarcely believe, whilst reading them, to have been, in the best sense, extemporaneously delivered. In that case Mr. Carlyle began the series, as we have heard, by bringing a manuscript which he evidently found much in his way, and presently abandoned. On the second evening he brought some notes or headings; but these also tripped him until he had left them. The remaining lectures were given like his conversation, which no one can hear without feeling that, with all its glow and inspiration, every sentence would be, if taken down, found faultless. It was so in his remarkable extemporaneous address yesterday. He had no notes whatever. 'But,' says our correspondent, in transmitting the report, 'I have never heard a speech of whose more remarkable qualities so few can be conveyed on paper. You will read of "applause" and "laughter," but you will little realize the eloquent blood flaming up the speaker's cheek, the kindling of his eye, or the inexpressible voice and look when the drolleries were coming out. When he spoke of clap-trap books exciting astonishment 'in the minds of foolish persons,' the evident halting at the word 'fools,' and the smoothing of his hair, as if he must be decorous, which preceded the change to 'foolish persons,' were exceedingly comical. As for the flaming bursts, they took shape in grand tones, whose impression was made deeper, not by raising, but by lowering the voice. Your correspondent here declares that he should hold it worth his coming all the way from London in the rain in the Sunday night train were it only to have heard Carlyle say, "There is a nobler ambition than the gaining of all California, or the getting of all the suffrages that are on the planet just now!"' In the first few minutes of the address there was some hesitation, and much of the shrinking that one might expect in a secluded scholar; but these very soon cleared away, and during the larger part, and to the close of the oration, it was evident that he was receiving a sympathetic influence from his listeners, which he did not fail to return tenfold. The applause became less frequent; the silence became that of a woven spell; and the recitation of the beautiful lines from Goethe, at the end, was so masterly—so marvellous—that one felt in it that Carlyle's real anathemas against rhetoric were but the expression of his knowledge that there is a rhetoric beyond all other arts."

In the Times the following leader appeared upon Mr. Carlyle's address:—

"There is something in the return of a man to the haunts of his youth, after he has acquired fame and a recognised position in the world, which is of itself sufficient to arrest attention. We are interested in the retrospect and the contrast, the juxtaposition of the old and the new, the hopes of early years, the memory of the struggles and contests of manhood, the repose of victory. A man may differ as much as he pleases from the doctrines of Mr. Carlyle, he may reject his historical teachings, and may distrust his politics, but he must be of a very unkindly disposition not to be touched by his reception at Edinburgh. It is fifty-four years, he told the students of the University, since he, a boy of fourteen, came as a student, 'full of wonder and expectation,' to the old capital of his native country, and now he returns, having accomplished the days of man spoken of by the Psalmist, that he may be honoured by students of this generation, and may give them a few words of advice on the life which lies before them.

"The discourse of the new Lord Rector squared very well with the occasion. There was no novelty in it. New truths are not the gifts which the old offer the young; the lesson we learn last is but the fulness of the meaning of what was only partially apprehended at first. Mr. Carlyle brought out things familiar enough to everyone who has read his works; there were the old platitudes and the old truths, and, it must be owned, mingled here and there with them the old errors. Time has, however, its recompenses, and if the freshness of youth seemed to be wanting in the address of the Rector, so also was its crudity. There was a singular mellowness in Mr. Carlyle's speech, which was reflected in the homely language in which it was couched. The chief lessons he had to enforce were to avoid cram, and to be painstaking, diligent, and patient in the acquisition of knowledge. Students are not to try to make themselves acquainted with the outsides of as many things as possible, and 'to go flourishing about' upon the strength of their acquisitions, but to count a thing as known only when it is stamped on their mind. The doctrine is only a new reading of the old maxim, non multa sed multum, but it is as much needed now as ever it was. Still more appropriate to the present day was Mr. Carlyle's protest against the notion that a University is the place where a man is to be fitted for the special work of a profession. A University, as he puts it, teaches a man how to read, or, as we may say more generally, how to learn. It is not the function of such a place to offer particular and technical knowledge, but to prepare a man for mastering any science by teaching him the method of all. A child learns the use of his body, not the art of a carpenter or smith, and the University student learns the use of his mind, not the professional lore of a lawyer or a physician. It is pleasant to meet with a strong reassertion of doctrines which the utilitarianism of a commercial and manufacturing age is too apt to make us all forget. Mr. Carlyle is essentially conservative in his notions on academic functions. Accuracy, discrimination, judgment, are with him the be-all and end-all of educational training. If a man has learnt to know a thing in itself, and in its relation to surrounding phenomena, he has got from a University what it is its proper duty to teach. Accordingly, we find him bestowing a good word on poor old Arthur Collins, who showed that he possessed these valuable qualities in the humble work of compiling a Peerage.

"The new Lord Rector is, however, as conservative in his choice of the implements of study as he is in the determination of its objects. The languages and the history of the great nations of antiquity he puts foremost, like any other pedagogue. The Greeks and the Romans are, he tells the Edinburgh students, 'a pair of nations shining in the records left by themselves as a kind of pillar to light up life in the darkness of the past ages;' and he adds that it would be well worth their while to get an understanding of what these people were, and what they did. It is here, however, that an old error of Mr. Carlyle's crops up among his well-remembered truths. He quotes from Machiavelli—evidently agreeing himself with the sentiment, though he refrained from asking the assent of his audience to it—the statement that the history of Rome showed that a democracy could not permanently exist without the occasional intervention of a Dictator. It is possible that if Machiavelli had had the experience of the centuries which have elapsed since his day, he would have seen fit to alter his conclusion, and it is to be regretted that the admiration which Mr. Carlyle feels for the great men of history will not allow him to believe in the possibility of a political society where each might find his proper sphere and duty without disturbing the order and natural succession of the commonwealth. His judgment on this point is like that of a man who had only known the steam-engine before the invention of governor balls, and was ready to declare that its mechanism would be shattered if a boy were not always at hand to regulate the pressure of the steam.

* * * * *

"We may turn, however, from this difference to another of Mr. Carlyle's doctrines, which mark at once his independence of thought and his respect for experience, where he declares the necessity for recognising the hereditary principle in government, if there is to be 'any fixity in things.' In the same way we find him almost lamenting the fact that Oxford, once apparently so fast-anchored as to be immovable, has begun to twist and toss on the eddy of new ideas.

"It is impossible to glance at Mr. Carlyle's Easter Monday discourse without recalling the oration which his predecessor pronounced on resigning office last autumn. * * * Mr. Carlyle is as simple and practical as his predecessor was dazzling and rhetorical. An ounce of mother wit, quotes the new Lord Rector, is worth a pound of clergy, and while he admires Demosthenes, he prefers the eloquence of Phocion. A little later he repeats his old doctrine on the virtue of silence, laments the fact that 'the finest nations in the world—the English and the American—are going all away into wind and tongue,' and protests that a man is not to be esteemed wise because he has poured out speech copiously. Mr. Carlyle has so often inculcated these sentiments in his books that there can be no suspicion of an arrière pensée in their utterance now, but the contrast between him and his predecessor is at the least instructive. Each does, however, in some measure, supply what is deficient in the other. No one would claim for the Chancellor of the Exchequer the intensity of power of his successor, but in his abundant energy, his wide sympathy with popular movement, and his real, if vague and indiscriminating, faith in the activity and progress of modern life, he conveys lessons of trust in the present, and hopefulness in the future, which would be ill-exchanged for the patient and somewhat sad stoicism of Mr. Carlyle."

Carlyle was still in Scotland on April 21, and there the terrible and solemn news had to be conveyed to him of the sudden death of her who had been his true and faithful life-companion for forty years.

Mrs. Carlyle died on Saturday, April 21, under very peculiar circumstances. She was taking her usual drive in Hyde Park about four o'clock, when her little favourite dog—which was running by the side of the brougham—was run over by a carriage. She was greatly alarmed, though the dog was not seriously hurt. She lifted the dog into the carriage, and the man drove on. Not receiving any call or direction from his mistress, as was usual, he stopped the carriage and discovered her, as he thought, in a fit, or ill, and drove to St. George's Hospital, which was near at hand. When there it was discovered that she must have been dead some little time. Mrs. Carlyle's health had been for several months feeble, but not in a state to excite anxiety or alarm.

On the following Wednesday her remains were conveyed from London to Haddington for interment there, and the funeral took place on Thursday afternoon. Mr. Carlyle was accompanied from London (whither he had returned immediately on the receipt of that solemn message) by his brother, Dr. Carlyle, Mr. John Forster, and the Hon. Mr. Twistleton. The funeral cortège was followed on foot by a large number of gentlemen who had known Mrs. Carlyle and her father, Dr. Welsh, who was held in high estimation in the town, where he had practised medicine till his death, in 1819. The grave, which is the same as that occupied by Dr. Welsh's remains, lies in the centre of the ruined choir of the old cathedral at Haddington. In accordance with the Scottish practice, there was no service read, and Mr. Carlyle threw a handful of earth on the coffin after it had been lowered into the grave.

* * * * *

Carlyle wrote the following inscription to be placed on his wife's tombstone:—

"Here likewise now rests Jane Welsh Carlyle, spouse of Thomas Carlyle, Chelsea, London. She was born at Haddington 14th July, 1801; only child of the above John Welsh and of Grace Welsh, Caplegell, Dumfriesshire, his wife. In her bright existence she had more sorrows than are common, but also a soft invincibility, a clearness of discernment, and a noble loyalty of heart which are rare. For forty years she was the true and loving helpmate of her husband, and by act and word unweariedly forwarded him as none else could in all of worthy that he did or attempted. She died at London, 21st April, 1866, suddenly snatched away from him, and the light of his life as if gone out."

Later in the same year, weighed down as he was by his great sorrow, Carlyle nevertheless thought it a public duty to come forward in defence of Governor Eyre, when the quelling of the Jamaica insurrection excited so much controversy, and seemed to divide England into two parties. He acted as Vice-President of the Defence Fund. The following is a letter written to Mr. Hamilton Hume, giving his views on the subject in full:

"Ripple Court, Ringwould, Dover,

"August 23, 1866.

"SIR,

"The clamour raised against Governor Eyre appears to me to be disgraceful to the good sense of England; and if it rested on any depth of conviction, and were not rather (as I always flatter myself it is) a thing of rumour and hearsay, of repetition and reverberation, mostly from the teeth outward, I should consider it of evil omen to the country and to its highest interests in these times. For my own share, all the light that has yet reached me on Mr. Eyre and his history in the world goes steadily to establish the conclusion that he is a just, humane, and valiant man, faithful to his trusts everywhere, and with no ordinary faculty of executing them; that his late services in Jamaica were of great, perhaps of incalculable value, as certainly they were of perilous and appalling difficulty—something like the case of 'fire,' suddenly reported, 'in the ship's powder room,' in mid-ocean where the moments mean the ages, and life and death hang on your use or misuse of the moments; and, in short, that penalty and clamour are not the thing this Governor merits from any of us, but honour and thanks, and wise imitation (I will farther say), should similar emergencies arise, on the great scale or on the small, in whatever we are governing!

"The English nation never loved anarchy, nor was wont to spend its sympathy on miserable mad seditions, especially of this inhuman and half-brutish type; but always loved order, and the prompt suppression of seditions, and reserved its tears for something worthier than promoters of such delirious and fatal enterprises who had got their wages for their sad industry. Has the English nation changed, then, altogether? I flatter myself it is not, not yet quite; but only that certain loose, superficial portions of it have become a great deal louder, and not any wiser, than they formerly used to be.

"At any rate, though much averse, at any time, and at this time in particular, to figure on committees, or run into public noises without call, I do at once, and feel that as a British citizen I should, and must, make you welcome to my name for your committee, and to whatever good it can do you. With the hope only that many other British men, of far more significance in such a matter, will at once or gradually do the like; and that, in fine, by wise effort and persistence, a blind and disgraceful act of public injustice may be prevented; and an egregrious folly as well—not to say, for none can say or compute, what a vital detriment throughout the British Empire, in such an example set to all the colonies and governors the British Empire has!

"Farther service, I fear, I am not in a state to promise, but the whole weight of my conviction and good wishes is with you; and if other service possible to me do present itself, I shall not want for willingness in case of need. Enclosed is my mite of contribution to your fund."I have the honour to be yours truly,

"T. CARLYLE."

"To HAMILTON HUME, Esq.,

"Hon. Sec. 'Eyre Defence Fund.'"

In August, 1867, Carlyle broke silence again with an utterance in the style of the Latter-Day Pamphlets, entitled "Shooting Niagara: and After?" published anonymously (though everyone, of course, knew it to be his) in Macmillan's Magazine. Shortly afterwards it was reprinted as a separate pamphlet, with additions, and with the author's name on the title-page.

In February, 1868, Carlyle wrote some Recollections of Sir William Hamilton, as a contribution to Professor Veitch's Memoir of that accomplished metaphysician.

In November, 1870, he addressed a long and very remarkable letter to the Times, on the French-German war, which is reprinted in the latest edition of his collected Miscellanies.

Two years later (November, 1872) he added a very beautiful Supplement to the People's Edition of his "Life of Schiller," founded on Saupe's "Schiller and his Father's Household," and other more recent books on Schiller that had appeared in Germany.

His last literary productions were a series of papers on "The Early Kings of Norway," and an Essay on "The Portraits of John Knox," which appeared, in instalments, in Fraser's Magazine, in the first four months of 1875. On the 4th December of that year, Carlyle attained his eightieth year, and this anniversary was signalised by some of the more distinguished of his friends and admirers by striking a medal, the head being executed by Mr. Boehm, whose noble statue of Carlyle, exhibited in the Royal Academy in the previous year, had won so much merited praise from Mr. Ruskin and others. The medal was accompanied by an address, signed by the subscribers. Carlyle seems to have been much gratified with this honour, which took him quite by surprise, and he expressed his acknowledgments as follows:—

"This of the medal and formal address of friends was an altogether unexpected event, to be received as a conspicuous and peculiar honour, without example hitherto anywhere in my life…. To you … I address my thankful acknowledgments, which surely are deep and sincere, and will beg you to convey the same to all the kind friends so beautifully concerned in it. Let no one of you be other than assured that the beautiful transaction, in result, management, and intention, was altogether gratifying, welcome, and honourable to me, and that I cordially thank one and all of you for what you have been pleased to do. Your fine and noble gift shall remain among my precious possessions, and be the symbol to me of something still more golden than itself, on the part of my many dear and too generous friends, so long as I continue in this world.

"Yours and theirs, from the heart,

"T. CARLYLE."

Carlyle's last public utterances were a letter on the Eastern Question, addressed to Mr. George Howard, and printed in the Times of November 28, 1876, and a letter to the Editor of the Times, on "The Crisis," printed in that journal on May 5, 1877.

He was now beginning to feel the effects of his great age. Yearly and monthly he grew more feeble. His wonted walking exercise had to be curtailed, and at last abandoned. He was affectionately and piously tended during these last years by his niece, Mary Aitken, now Mrs. Alexander Carlyle. In the autumn of 1879 he lost his brother, Dr. John Aitken Carlyle, the translator of Dante's "Inferno."

The end came at last, after a long and gradual decay of strength. The great writer and noble-hearted man passed away peacefully at about half-past eight o'clock on the morning of Saturday, February 5, 1881, in the eighty-sixth year of his age.

His remains were conveyed to Scotland, and were laid in the burial-ground at Ecclefechan, where the ashes of his father and mother, and of others of his kindred, repose. He had executed what is known in Scotch law as a "deed of mortification," by virtue of which he bequeathed to Edinburgh University the estate of Craigenputtoch—which had come to him through his wife—for the foundation of ten Bursaries in the Faculty of Arts, to be called the "John Welsh Bursaries." In his Will he bequeathed the books which he had used in writing on Cromwell and Friedrich to Harvard College, Massachusetts.

In less than a month after his death, with a haste on many accounts to be deplored, and which has excited much animadversion, his literary executor, Mr. James Anthony Froude, the historian, issued two volumes of posthumous "Reminiscences," written by Carlyle, partly in 1832, and partly in 1866-67. The first section consists of a memorial paper, written immediately after his father's death; the second contains Reminiscences of his early friend, Edward Irving, commenced at Cheyne Row in the autumn of 1866, and finished at Mentone on the 2nd January, 1867. The Reminiscences of Lord Jeffrey were begun on the following day, and finished on January 19. The paper on Southey and Wordsworth, relegated to the Appendix, was also written at Mentone between the 28th January and the 8th March, 1867. The Memorials of his wife, which fill the greater part of the second volume, were written at Cheyne Row, during the month after her death.